Stories tagged
‘batanes’

Health politics demoralizes doctors

WHEN BARRIO doctor Richard Lariosa arrived in Tagapul-an, Samar in 2002, he was surprised to learn that medicines for the town were being kept at the mayor’s office. “When you gave a prescription to a patient not of the same political color as the mayor, he’d be told by the people at the mayor’s office there was no medicine even when they were still a lot,” the doctor says. “Color coding.”